PaaS
Platform as a Service solutions offer businesses a full-stack solution to develop applications. From fully managed databases to services that simplify the development and management of microservices.
At Coduity we do not recommend going this route when developing applications. We instead offer solutions to move PaaS deployments to self-hosted solutions that allow for either continued development, or maintenance and incremental migration.
3rd party PaaS solutions are often prohibitively expensive over time:
- Limited scaling
- Vendor lock-in
- Expensive at higher tiers
One way or the other it generally means that the deployment will have to be migrated to other solutions and platforms at significant cost in labour and infrastructure services. As standalone microservices have few dependencies beyond commonly used libraries and Serverless solutions may be deployed on fully open source environments, PaaS solutions do not stack up by comparison.
While there are a growing number of self-hosted solutions available such as Dapr, we believe the way forward is a mesh of standalone native code microservices and serverless solutions. Businesses that have hit a wall with PaaS development are best served with our consultancy services.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is PaaS not recommended?
In our experience cloud hosted PaaS is at best a partially viable solution for small to medium sized deployments, as long as a stable platform is chosen. By that we mean a platform that is unlikely to get discontinued in the future.
Most hosted PaaS solutions are prohibitively expensive at scale as well as having limitations on scaling in general. We believe it is best to lay the groundwork for hyperscale whether it will come to it or not.
Self-hosted PaaS solutions such as Kubernetes based PaaS solutions do improve the situation considerably, but the issue of long-term viability remains. Coduity does develop with PaaS on request as well as offering a host of services to help businesses migrate away from PaaS platforms incrementally.
Our preferred approach however is to avoid PaaS platforms altogether so we can ensure that solutions are easily migrated onto any infrastructure or platform, avoiding future issues right from the start.
How is PaaS more of a vendor lock-in risk?
All forms of PaaS require applications to be coded with tight integration to highly specific APIs and / or software libraries that are not based on open standards. This makes migration particularly labour intensive and expensive.
Hosted PaaS solutions such as those offered by Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle compound the situation by strongly incentivising integration with proprietary databases and database APIs. This further increases migration cost to the point of near infeasibility.
It is crucial that businesses run software that is vendor agnostic so they cannot be locked into a specific platform, sacrificing leverage and negotiation positions. Software that is built against Kubernetes for instance is considerably lower risk as Kubernetes is open source, industry standard and available on every cloud platform.
Can Coduity help us migrate our PaaS based applications?
Certainly. We offer comprehensive services to help your business or project move away from PaaS. Such as moving your software stack onto a private infrastructure, porting code bases to more robust designs and more. In these cases it is best to start with a consultancy session.